January 27, 2010

In this talk we argue that the traditional view of vowel-driven palatalization in Russian is inadequate, at least for two reasons. First, it relies on a six-vowel interpretation of the Russian inventory that is not adequate from a phonetic perspective. Second, and more importantly, it undergenerates the range of alternations found in Modern Standard Russian. Instead, we argue that palatalization must be driven by a floating feature attached to the left edge of suffixes.